In my day job, I advise individuals and corporations on how to deal with crisis situations. The most important rule for surviving a public calamity is to ensure that on day one, there is a recognition of damage done, an expression of empathy towards any victims, and a complete admission of all relevant facts. If there is no risk of further damaging details being revealed at a later date, then the worst has come and gone, and every day gets better.
It is a shame that Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor didn’t follow this advice back in 2019 when he agreed to be interviewed by the BBC’s Emily Maitlis about, as he put it at the time, “Mr Epstein and all things associated”. Six years later, with every cache of documents released by the US Department of Justice relating to the late paedophile billionaire Jeffrey Epstein, every day just gets worse for the former prince, and more problematic for the Royal Family.
Mountbatten-Windsor has vehemently denied all allegations of wrongdoing, but who knows what more we have still to learn about his association with the disgraced financier and Epstein’s girlfriend Ghislaine Maxwell, who is now serving a 20-year prison sentence for luring teenage girls to be sexually abused.
At the end of last week, the release of 3,900 documents relating to Epstein included a remarkable photograph of Mountbatten-Windsor, in full black tie with dickie bow, lying prone across five female laps, faces blacked out to protect their identities. This was bad enough, but more documents from the Epstein files, put into the public domain yesterday, reveal emails to Maxwell from someone signing himself off as “A” or “The Invisible Man”.
In one, which purports to be from the “Balmoral Summer Camp”, the writer asks Maxwell whether she has found him any “inappropriate friends”. In another, from August 2001, “The Invisible Man” talks about leaving “the RN” (Mountbatten-Windsor left the Royal Navy a month earlier). And then there are messages in 2002 about arrangements for a trip to Peru (we know, from photographs at the time, that Mountbatten-Windsor visited Peru that year).
Still, because there is no actual proof that these emails came from Mountbatten-Windsor, it is better to concentrate on the significance of that photograph of night-time high jinks, in which Andrew, eyes closed, wears the contented smile of a man who is happy with his place in the world. He is in what appears to be in the saloon room at the Windsors’ Sandringham estate in Norfolk, and there, in the background, smiling broadly, is Maxwell.
What this photo proves is not that Mountbatten-Windsor is guilty of any offence, but that he abused his privilege (employing the late Queen’s beloved estate and its staff for his own rambunctious activities) and that he was an idiot (he must have been aware of the possibility of this photograph, or others, emerging at some point, which would contradict the studied insouciance he betrayed in the Maitlis interview).
However, given the widespread accusation that the wholesale redaction in the thousands of documents relating to Epstein released last week is no more than a cover-up of a cover-up, it is hard to avoid the sense that this saga continues to raise some uncomfortable questions for the Royal Family.
It stretches our disbelief that senior royals, including the late Queen Elizabeth, were unaware of the seemingly sketchy private life of a man who was once second in line to the throne. With the might of the UK’s security services at their service, why didn’t they think Andrew’s association with Epstein, even before his conviction for sex offences in 2008, was worthy of inspection?
We live in an all-seeing, all-knowing world, and there was a clear and constant risk of exposure. Even “The Invisible Man” cannot remain invisible for ever. So why did it take the Royal Family so long to rescind his titles, and remove him from the public purse, and from his grace-and-favour residence in Windsor? Remarkably, he is still in the line of succession.
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His was clearly conduct unbecoming, if not actual wrongdoing, and unless there is some moment of truth and reconciliation – a vain hope, I know – these questions will infect King Charles’s reign, and possibly that of William beyond. It is hard to know what the royals can do now. The time for a full account, which could have led to some form of realignment in public estimation, has surely come and gone.
And so the stench of rumour and innuendo continues to hang over the House of Windsor. And with that, the picture of a royal prince in a position of louche reclinement is now burned into the public consciousness. This is not simply a voyeuristic glimpse into a world of which we know little. It is a remarkable and injurious image of what happens when people born into a structure that relies on privilege and indulgence believe they are above scrutiny. And it is why this should remain a matter of enduring concern for the Royal Family.
Simon Kelner is chief executive of Seven Dials and a former editor of The Independent
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